Online commerce is experiencing dramatic growth in recent years. Merchants are developing sites on the World Wide Web (or simply "WWW" or "Web") at a rapid pace. With Web sites in place, consumers can access and order goods and/or services electronically over the Internet from the comfort of their own homes or offices. It is becoming fairly common for a consumer to browse a merchant's catalog online, select a product, place an order for the product, and pay for the product all electronically over the Internet.
Merchants want Web sites that are customized to their product line. Ideally, merchants might like to design their own Web site to create a desired shopping atmosphere suitable for their products and services. Unfortunately, most merchants do not have the technical expertise to create and maintain a Web site on the Internet. As a result, merchants typically hire independent consulting firms to create and/or manage Web sites on the merchants' behalf
It would therefore be beneficial to design a system that permits a merchant to create its own Web site without requiring the merchant to possess software design and programming skills.
To aid the following discussion, it might prove useful to provide additional background information on how resources are formatted and rendered over the Internet. Resources available on the Internet are most commonly presented as hypertext. "Hypertext," also referred to as "hypermedia," is a metaphor for presenting information in which text, images, sounds, and actions become linked together in a complex, non-sequential Web of associations that permit a user to browse through related topics, regardless of the presented order of the topics. Hypertext content is widely used for navigation and information dissemination on the Web. A "Web browser" is normally used to retrieve and render hypertext content from the Web.
Hypertext content is commonly organized as documents with embedded control information. The embedded control information includes formatting specifications, indicating how a document is to be rendered by the Web browser. In addition, such control information can include links or "hyperlinks," which are symbols or instructions telling the Web browser where to find other related VWeb documents on the Internet.
Hypertext content is commonly written in a "markup language." "SGML" (Standard Generalized Markup Language) is one such hypertext language, defined formally as "a language for document representation that formalizes markup and frees it of system and processing dependencies." SGML is a language for describing the structure of documents and for describing a tagging scheme to delineate that structure within text.
For creating hypertext content, Web documents utilize a subset of SGML called "HTML" (Hypertext Markup Language). An HTML textual document can be thought of as plain text that contains formatting instructions in the form of HTML markup codes or "tags." Tags tell Web browsers how to render and print documents, and are also used to specify hyperlinks.
The following is a simple example of a portion of an HTML document containing a single hyperlink:
Microsoft has a Web page with the latest &lt;A HREF="HTTP://www.microsoft.com/upgrades"&gt; upgrades&lt;/A&gt; to its popular word processing program. PA1 Microsoft has a Web page with the latest upgrades to its popular word processing program. PA1 &lt;HTML&gt; PA1 &lt;BODY PA1 &gt; PA1 &lt;P&gt;Colored text here. PA1 &lt;/BODY&gt; PA1 &lt;/HTML&gt;
The angled brackets define hypertext tags. When rendered by a Web browser, the word "upgrades" would appear highlighted and/or underlined to the user, and the text within the angled brackets would not appear at all, as follows:
By clicking on the highlighted keyword "upgrades," the user can instruct the Web browser to activate the underlying URL. In this case, the underlying URL is to an HTTP (hypertext) document located at host computer "www.microsoft.com," having the file name "upgrades."
Hypertext usage is not limited to the Internet. Various multimedia applications utilize hypertext to allow users to navigate through different pieces of information content. For instance, an encyclopedia program might use hyperlinks to provide cross-references to related articles within an electronic encyclopedia. The same program might also use hyperlinks to specify remote information resources such as Web documents located on different computers.
Microsoft Corporation has recently introduced a technology referred to as "Active Server Pages." An active server page, or "ASP", allows a user to write Web pages using a combination of a hypertext language (e.g., HTML) and a scripting language, such as Visual Basic from Microsoft Corporation or Java.TM. from Sun Microsystems. As an example, the following ASP file contains scripting language to define the colors used in the web page for the background, hyperlinks, and text.
bgcolor=&lt;%=Application("color_bgcolor")%&gt; PA2 link=&lt;%=Application ("color_link")%&gt; PA2 text=&lt;%=Application(("color_text")%&gt;
The hypertext terms are set apart by the angled brackets "&lt;" and "&gt;" such as "&lt;HTML&gt;" and "&lt;BODY&gt;". The delimiters "&lt;%" and "%&gt;" denote the instructions in the scripting language. When the ASP file is read and rendered by a Web browser, the scripting instructions within the delimiters are executed to fill in the background color, link color, and text color. The result is a familiar hypertext document.
Active Server Pages are described in documentation available from Microsoft's Web site "www.microsoft.com", under the section Internet Information Services. This text is hereby incorporated by reference.